


Love and Death

by Miss_M



Category: CARTER Angela - Works, The Lady of the House of Love - Angela Carter
Genre: Canon Continuation, Dark, F/M, Gen, Haunting, Trauma, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Vampires, War, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-03 11:03:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5288303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His rational mind used to make sense of every occurrence along the sun-dappled path of his life, everything in moderation. Moderation had no place in the hailstorm of bullets which felled men to the left and right of him, as far down the line as the eye could reach. The embrace of Nosferatu had spared him in Romania, and shielded him now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love and Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thegirlwiththemouseyhair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlwiththemouseyhair/gifts).



> “The Lady of the House of Love” can be read [here](http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/120015766516/the-lady-of-the-house-of-love-by-angela-carter). I own nothing.

The Channel ferry which carried him to France was called _Victoria_. Every cabin was full, leaving the men to huddle on the open deck in their summer uniforms. The breeze carried no scents more foreboding than salt and, near dawn, drying hay from the fields which backed onto the beaches and tarred piers. 

“My kind are not meant to cross open water,” she whispered into his ear deep in the night, the moon hidden behind a scrim of cloud. Dark as the grave. The tintinnabulation of her laughter woke him, a glassy carillon insinuating itself into his mind. 

He lay still on the narrow bunk and imagined he could hear her bare feet, light as a child’s, gallop across the deck as she ran past the other cabins’ closed doors, laughing at him, daring him to chase her. In life, in undeath, she had not been so playful or so energetic.

He rolled onto his side, pressed one ear to his pillow while the other filled with the slop and gurgle of the sea against the hull delivering its human cargo to war. He knew he could be on the front line as early as the new day’s close. His men would depend on him to offer them guidance, he would need his wits about him. He needed to rest, a healthy night’s sleep followed by a cold sponge bath and a shave. He could not lie awake, wracked by nightmares – it was unbecoming. 

Despite his faith in progress, he too had been a creature of static beliefs when he’d set off on his bicycle earlier in the summer. As he had changed the lovely, lonely countess in her decrepit castle, so he was himself changed. He did not realize at first what he had escaped when she spared him the gift of her embrace. Once he did realize, he could no longer escape. 

His rational mind used to make sense of every occurrence along the sun-dappled path of his life, everything in moderation. Moderation had no place in the hailstorm of bullets which felled men to the left and right of him, as far down the line as the eye could reach. He saw a captain he knew, good chap from his school, fall just by his elbow, as though someone had got him in the eye with a snowball during games at the end of Michaelmas term. Red spots bloomed on the captain’s chest and stomach like roses. He saw the man fall without turning his head, without daring to take his eye off the direction from which the deadly storm raged. All around him men fell like sheaves, like cut flowers, yet he remained ungrazed, untouched. The embrace of Nosferatu had spared him in Romania, and shielded him now.

When he got back to quarters that night, as the sole surviving officer from eight platoons it fell to him to compile the report on the day’s losses. He stayed up late into the night, poring over lists of missing, wounded, and dead, calculating percentages. 

So many breathing, broken or, more rarely, whole, himself included among the latter. 

So many dead. 

After he handed the report over to a courier, he took up his pen again, to write to his mother and sister and let them know he was well. He drew a clean sheet, dated it, and wrote out an affectionate greeting in his neat hand. 

He put down his pen and shut his billet’s thin door, folded a clean handkerchief with his monogram embroidered in the pale-blue thread his sister favored, and clenched it between his strong teeth. Then he screamed. And screamed. And screamed some more. The cloth swallowed up the sound. The lusty current of life in him kept rushing out and out of his lungs, yet would not be exhausted.

Her hand, light as cobwebs, smoothed back the fair hair sticking to his brow when he was, at last, out of breath and sobbing silently into his ruined handkerchief, his eyes dry. “Hush, my darling,” her ghostly voice soothed. Her talons combed his hair, the barest comforting scratch across his scalp. “Hush now. It’s all right. I won’t let them have you.”

The trenches resembled hairy caterpillars or cicatrices scratched into and across the land, the flat downs and gently rolling hills of Picardy and Flanders. His first posting was near Ypres, a forward position, surrounded by the enemy on three sides. He beheld the landscape of churned mud and broken bones, the blasted, leafless trees and briar tangles of barbed wire, and his rationalist good humor wobbled but did not desert him, not quite.

He was a child of England’s green fields and rose hedges with tiny thorns. In sleeping beauty’s dark home, surrounded by murderous roses, he learned the world was more and other than he’d been taught. He re-learned that lesson again and again while he stood in muddy water up to his ankles, up to his knees, and looked up at the sliver of sky – blue, grey, ink-black, smoking, boiling like pitch – above the trench. The absurd, pathetic, haughty sky. 

_Now you are at the place of annihilation. Now you are truly in the country of the dead._

His batman, a Shropshire lad named Jenkins, passed on the stories the men swapped while huddling over tobacco and field rations. Stories told and retold till they grew soft and easy to hold, like letters from home, read and reread till the paper grew soggy and the words ran together, the content better than memorized. Till the words got soaked into the bloodstream. The Angel of Mons. The Canadian crucified by the Germans. The deserters of every stripe living in underground caverns in no man’s land, scavenging food and tobacco from the litter of dead bodies left behind by every attempted advance. 

He could almost believe that last one, for were they not all troglodytes in the trenches? His quarters were a narrow chamber with walls and ceiling and floor of packed mud, held up by irrational faith and beams slowly rotting in the constant damp. He wore gumboots he’d taken off a dead Prussian that first October, while the Eighth Commandment, the fact that stealing from the dead was barbarous and unworthy of an Englishman, and his entire upbringing crumbled before the fact that the boots his mother had sent him from Crockett and Jones leaked like a sieve. 

As for dead men savaged and unearthly beings hovering over battlefields, the only such he knew, the only such he had ever seen – and seeing is believing – was the girl he’d tried to save and lost. 

One day in late autumn, when it stopped raining for a half hour, he sat down on an empty ammunition crate to eat his midday ration, when the wall of the trench against which he leaned his back shifted and began to crumble. He jumped up as the muck covered his erstwhile seat. Mixed in with the earth were hunks of flesh, a shoulder here, half an arm or a leg there, in moldering tatters of uniform. A round helmet rolled to a stop at his feet, half a man’s skull still inside it, scoured clean by rats or damp or the neat slice of shrapnel. 

Jenkins rounded up a clean-up party, the men – boys, really – making macabre jokes, and he let them, for how else could they shovel up pieces of a man’s body and tamp them back into the trench wall like so much gravel? 

“See ‘ere,” one of them said just loudly enough so he would hear, “this bloke burst in on the lieutenant!” The others laughed dutifully, a threadbare braying.

The countess picked up the dead man’s helmet, popped it on her head at a rakish angle, regardless of the man’s skull still inside it. She smiled. “Does it suit me?” she asked, eager, girlish, her sharp teeth gleaming in the ditchwater light between bouts of rain. 

He said nothing. He could not accept the possibility that he might respond to her. He was still a child of the century which should have been the best and brightest in humanity’s long and sorrowful history. He could not have borne speaking to a figment of his regret and guilt, the embodiment of his loneliness in the midst of impersonal carnage. 

As he watched her cavort down the length of the trench in her muddy helmet, undaunted by the sun peeking through the clouds, he wondered, not for the first time since coming to Flanders, what kind of meat had been in the spicy stew he had so enjoyed that night in the Carpathians, in the hour before he had met her. He did not linger on that thought. 

When spring came and the stench of thawed-out bodies mixed in with the mud as in a butter churn proved overwhelming even for those who had lived through the whole autumn and winter in Flanders, he stole an hour one day to let his men bathe in a narrow river, a stream really, green and clean as though it flowed out of Eden, between banks untouched by war. 

Some of the older men hesitated till they saw their captain – for he was a captain now, by dint of having contrived to live so long – strip off his lice-infested uniform and wade in. Within a quarter hour they were laughing and splashing each other like young boys in a millpond. 

Jenkins perched on the edge of the stream, held himself tautly on his toes, feigning he would dive in head-first. His long limbs and narrow ribcage were pale as the belly of a fish after the long winter in the mud, when tea had frozen in their tin mugs and their lungs had felt as though they would burst from the frigid air. 

He waved to the lad, warned him the water was too shallow for diving. He must have imagined the wink Jenkins tossed him a moment before the others seized the lad and dragged him thrashing into the water. The insolent scamp…

He turned his back on the laughing men to conceal his blush, and was not surprised to find her crouched on all fours on the water’s edge. Her long wedding dress, untouched by any filth other than her meals, was tucked up between her legs, high above her knees. Her shins were dusted with dark hairs. She eyed the bathing men, and though neither her teeth nor her claws were red, the hunger in her eyes was as obvious as the sun burning their pale skins. 

“Such beautiful boys,” she crooned, so that a chill ran down his spine. He marveled that his spine was capable of being chilled by anything in creation, her least of all creatures great and small. Her hunger alighted on all his men alike, the young and the middle-aged, those taut as bowstrings and those sagging like sourdough. 

“So much sweet, living flesh, all in one place,” she whispered. Her nails raked the ground as she shifted from haunch to haunch like a mare in heat. “And all mine.”

One winter night, in the smoky darkness solid as a block of ice, after he’d blown out the light in his underground billet, she had told him about the bundles of bones and clothes buried in her old garden, and he had, much to his ineradicable shame as an English gentleman, thrown his tooth glass at her.

He said nothing now, while she salivated. He concentrated on feeling the sun on his back, letting the men’s cries and splashes lull him. Death waited for them all, arguing with her about it did no good and only made a fuss.

The next time they went over the top, Jenkins stumbled into a deep crater made by mortar fire, filled with the filthy soup of underground water, decomposing human matter, and inanimate minerals. The Shropshire lad had put on his regulation gas mask and his heavy haversack before scrambling up out of the trench, but he could not swim. A mouthful or two of air trapped in his gas mask, the haversack a millstone on his back, the young batman drowned while bullets reaped their harvest above and around him.

He found a pack of cards with pictures among Jenkins’ belongings, afterward. He should not have gone rummaging in another man’s property at all, but it struck him as preferable to useless carrying on. His hands shook as he opened the pack, expecting to find the countess’ painted playthings, but every single one of Jenkins’ cards showed the grinning visage of the Grim Reaper. 

Wrapped up like a silkworm in the dual mystic protections of his virginity and the countess’ love, he was like death unto his men, watching as they were taken in their dozens and hundreds and thousands, while he endured unscathed. He fell to his knees and wept for Jenkins, for he could not keep all their faces in his head, there were too many, and he but one man. She held him while he wept, her thin arms firm as a band of iron around his muscular arms, his trembling shoulders. 

After he had cried his fill, a child comforted by the act of pouring out its sorrow, he lay on his narrow cot with the over-starched sheets, and she nestled between his chest and the earthen wall, with its melted and crooked map of this blighted continent, shaped from patches of damp. Her bird’s bones molded themselves to the contours of his body, her head lay light on his shoulder. 

They understood each other much better now she was gone and a part of him. She spoke with a softer accent, her words came more easily, as did his. It was like talking to himself, a feminine himself, odd enough to keep him aware of the oddity, familiar enough to be a comfort. His refuge from the charnel house of his nights and days was the memory of a dead unnatural girl from the romantic Balkans. Had he been still the man who’d gone on a cycling holiday one summer, he would have laughed. He would not have wept. He had never used to, before.

He could not banish her, could not even remember when he’d allowed manners to win out and started responding to her remarks, when he’d stopped wishing she’d vanish. He had become a haunted house in his own right. 

On leave in a French town mostly flattened into nonexistence, transformed as by a kiss from a sharp-fanged mouth, he wandered into the civic museum, its paltry treasures secreted in an underground vault, more of a cellar. Paintings were stacked up against the walls, hung from rusty nails better suited to barn doors. Between a large pastoral scene painted in browns and greens the shade of a pond at frog-spawn season, and a _nature morte_ with flies and snails invading a sumptuous feast of luscious, obscene fruit, the ripe skin already spotted with putrefaction and gleaming with pearly drops of dew, he beheld a small portrait of a pale, dark-haired woman with a knowing curl to her voluptuous red lips and a single red rose held up between her long, white fingers, as though offered up in mocking tribute.

He choked upon the sight, his lungs burning as from the first, telltale whiff of mustard gas, and had to be helped up the stairs out of the vault. 

The portrait was hundreds of years old, the woman in it wore a white lace ruff and a Huguenot’s sober black garb as well as her malevolent, irresistible smile. It was not her, it could not be her, and God forbid it should be her. He understood why all the fruit of her accursed line had insisted on their likenesses being preserved to haunt their posterity – it was the only way they could know themselves and what they looked like, since mirrors renounced them as though they did not exist.

He left the museum and went straight to the officers’ brothel in town, the kind where a paying customer could lock the door and take his time, for a half hour at least, instead of rutting behind a thin curtain, other men forming a queue on the other side. He tossed his virginity into the lap of a young woman with cornflower plaits and tired eyes. His old colonel, the one who’d wanted to send him to the specialist brothel in Paris, was long dead. He beheld no mysteries when the girl took off her thin, patched shift. The only sounds during the brief act were his own grunts and the countess’ mocking laughter echoing in his ears, like the distant whistle and thud of shells.

Her eyes followed him around the room when he got back to his temporary billet, from washstand to dresser to bed, eyes large and shiny as moonstones. She uttered not a word of reproach. She had always seduced, flirted, surprised and disarmed with her beauty and her unlikeliness, lest her bridegrooms saw her too soon for what she was. The night she died, he had dreamed of fixing her up like a doll, taking her to various specialists who would push and prod and file down various aspects of her, till she was acceptable. They were both birds who could trill but the one song.

She spoke from the darkness, once he was abed and had blown out the candle. She stayed on the other side of the room, by the window. The moonlight shone through her. 

“You used to lack belief and imagination,” she said, as though narrating a history lesson in the mundane light of day. “Now you know better, and therein lies danger. Your lack of belief sustained you. Your lack of true, carnal knowledge.” She rolled the word ‘carnal’ on her tongue like toffee before she chewed it up, always such a greedy child. 

Then she sniffed like a cat, a prim little miss. “There are other ways of getting a discharge, easier and more pleasant than a bullet or one of love’s diseases.”

On the threshold of Nosferatu’s castle, he had remembered all the childhood reasons for being afraid of the dark. He’d ignored them because he was no longer a child, and staying had been the more practical and politer thing to do. The batman he’d had before poor old Jenkins had been shot for desertion. He had asked to be present at the execution, unsure what he meant to achieve: a last goodbye, a silent reprimand or a moment of shared brotherhood and mutual encouragement, which had been impossible when going over the top. His colonel had called the notion of his staying for the execution balderdash and ordered him back to the front at once. 

The countess’ voice would not let him be. “You could have buggered that sweet boy. What was his name, Jenkins?” She pronounced it the French way, _Zhenkins_. “He gave you so many opportunities. They’d have sent you home when they found out.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. The afterimage of exploding shells was painted on his eyelids. “Please leave me be,” he whispered. He felt as though she had drained him dry at last, a long, slow, painful deflowering. 

His bed did not dip when she sat on it. He felt only her razor-tipped hand land on his shoulder, light as a fallen leaf. Her voice assumed again the ocean’s sonorousness, all the generations of her poisonous family converging in her throat. 

“I wanted so much to be normal,” she whispered in his ear. He felt no stirring of warm breath on his earlobe. “But I couldn’t accomplish it on my own. I can only be what I am. My end and my beginning. My strength and what ended me.”

“No…” he pleaded weakly. 

“Oh but yes, my darling.” She kissed his cheek, her plump lips shielding him from her teeth. Her lips were as soft and waxen as two rose petals. A dry kiss like a promise broken and impossible to repair. “Yes. You made me wait so long for your arrival, but we are only what God and fate will allow us to be.”

True love killed sleeping beauty, but some love is stronger even than death. Not even the loss of his magical virginity to another could snatch him from his bride’s protecting arms. Just before Christmas 1918 he landed at Dover and caught a train home. His mother embraced him, and his sister cried until mother reminded her such behavior was excessive and there were servants about.

After a fashion, the countess would have been just the girl his mother still hoped he might marry: shy, retiring, proper, of good family. Foreign, though. With unnatural appetites. Impeccable manners might have made up for her preference for blood over tea, but mother would not have passed over her being a foreigner easily, if at all. 

His old life rejected him, like a snake attempting to slither back into its discarded skin. He paused unnaturally long over his cutlery, wondering why he needed more than one fork. His hand tended to shake, so he dropped his steaming teacup on his foot once and exclaimed ‘Bugger!’, sharp as a rifle crack, while the vicar’s daughters were visiting to welcome the returning hero home. Once or twice, sitting down to Christmas supper or New Year’s tea, he started to talk about what he had seen and done, but he bit his tongue when he saw his mother’s glacial expression, his sister’s wide eyes, like a frightened mare’s. His mouth filled with salty blood. The countess laid a cool hand on the back of his neck to steady him. 

He attempted to ride his bicycle again. It had been stored with loving care and regularly oiled on mother’s orders, but he discovered he loathed the infernal contraption now. He no longer believed anything in the world could be entirely harmless. He took to walking instead, long hikes around the neighborhood, more akin to forced marches than pleasant afternoon strolls. He came home after dark, slinking indoors like a thief after the household was abed, and slept without dreams, no teasing laughter snatching him from his slumber.

When the ground thawed, he asked the gardener to plant some rosebushes under his window. He had thrown away her rose before embarking for France, a futile gesture which now struck him as a sort of sacrilege, spitting on a precious gift. The gardener protested the ground was too salty for roses, so he rolled up his sleeves and planted two bushes himself, ruining his best tweed trousers and enraging his mother. Yet his roses took root and bloomed in due course, though they never brought forth flowers as ripe and rampant as the rose his bride had gifted him. 

Finally mother sent him to London to consult with a physician newly arrived from the Continent. Mother distrusted all things Continental. He took it as a sign of her desperation that she would stoop to this (“You weren’t wounded,” she told him sharply over breakfast one morning. “One mustn’t carry on.”), so he went meekly enough, lay on the leather couch, and said as little as possible. On the train down he had longed to tell the physician his darkest secret, the woman who weighed on his heart and soul yet had sustained him through four years in hell. But when the doctor smiled, attempting to put the patient at ease, the doctor’s yellow teeth looked too sharp for comfort, so he locked up his secrets deep inside and told mother the physician had recommended plenty of exercise, such as walking or gardening. And time, acres of time, balm for all wounds. 

On a June night his bedroom window stood open to let in the breeze from the sea, the scent of roses thick on the air, like frankincense and myrrh. He lay on his bed, still in his shirt and braces, and could not sleep. He had worked in the garden all day, despite mother’s tutting, until he’d scoured his mind thoroughly. Still, sleep evaded him.

They would not be naked together, not ever, as though they had come into the world fully formed and garbed, he in his uniform, she in her mother’s wedding dress, the cloth fused to their skin, lovers-close. They were their boundaries. To cross them, to cross over to where they could be each other’s, would end them. 

She had ended already. He should have done, his death trailing behind him like a fox’s tail, capacious and impossible to ignore. 

Her pale hand reached out to him, tipped with rending talons and tangible as a moonbeam. “No, my darling. You must live.” 

“Why must I? This world is a vile oubliette. I no longer care if they call me a coward for it. So many brave chaps died, what price my life?”

“Life was always precious to me. Someone has to remember, to carry it all.” She did not explain why he should be the one to carry it, did not attempt to shame him by calling it his duty.

“Will you stay with me?” 

He spoke without thinking, without daring to wonder if he was a fool. Yet he had not turned so foolish as to ask a figment of his fevered mind if she would help him carry the burden. He nearly laughed out loud at his own lingering inhibitions. 

She smiled. Her teeth were sharp pearls. “Of course I will. I am yours forever.” 

He had known this already, needed to hear it still. Self-evident truths shored up by repetition, made real by words uttered out loud. The words echoed inside his hollow skull like a distant barrage.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this is the kind of dark and horror-y you can enjoy without suffering sleepless nights, thegirlwiththemouseyhair. I poached a lot of details about soldiers’ experiences on the Western Front from Paul Fussell’s _The Great War and Modern Memory_ and Modris Eksteins’ _The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age_. Their historical analysis can be suspect, but they offer some great anecdotes. I also made stuff up – after all, Angela Carter used World War I for its symbolic rather than its factual value. Any mistakes are mine.


End file.
